Painting icons in the postmodern kitchen

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Painting icons in the postmodern kitchen,
Under the scrutiny of stoves and vegetables,
At the cooking crossroad
of air and fire, water and earth,
A pilgrimage through the memory and imagination,
Through the forehead to non-existent eyes and mouth,
Exploring Madonna like a snail through a garden,
Painting the face as a landscape,
Landscape as a witness of manmade tragedy,
The kitchen view on the sick Adamello glacier –
Soon here will be no landscape,
Only light and shade in a Picasso-shaped space.
The purpose is to repeat, the repent, to repaint, re-incarnate,
Because people forget.
Painting in the kitchen is no storytelling,
Paintings is a worship,
Painting icons you circle
Around yourself,
Dwell achingly long on the nose whose relevance remains mystifying,
Your hand wanders, and stagnates,
It slows down to the pace of memory,
(Do you remember Madonna?),
Quickens to the tempo of vanishing dreams,
Desecrates wrinkles, freckles of a figurative face…
Your hand confesses the abstract nature of energy –
silence-
Painting icons while
The phone bell begins to toll,
You cradle the brush and keep the oil,
Sounds from the downstairs bar’s noise – TV news –
Men running in an effort to catch the manna
Thrown from an airplane down on starving
People following the flying iron bird,
Then, people start falling, one by one,
(Scenes not seen since Vietnam!)
One on one, like toys,
Shelling – the shells – shelling – the shells –
Here there is no more landscape –
the red of the bodies blending with the sandy yellow
of what were once roads  –
A singular view from the postmodern kitchen
on Earth
In the year of 2024.

*Painting “икона” by Sara Maino, 2024